Various actual questions re: science/religion...

[NotReady]

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First, do you understand the concept that 'transitional forms' is a nonsense term,


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I was going to investigate this idea further before posting on it but since you brought it up:

Doesn't this make Darwinism unfalsifiable? Before you tell me about rabbits in the Cambrian, I obviously mean on a realistic basis. Whatever form you show me that you claim is transitional I can claim is a separate species.

BTW, this idea was what I was pursing with the phylogeny/homology thread that got chopped up so bad: how do you determine a form is transitional, especially if morphology produces errors?

[vhawk01]

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First, do you understand the concept that 'transitional forms' is a nonsense term,


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I was going to investigate this idea further before posting on it but since you brought it up:

Doesn't this make Darwinism unfalsifiable? Before you tell me about rabbits in the Cambrian, I obviously mean on a realistic basis. Whatever form you show me that you claim is transitional I can claim is a separate species.

BTW, this idea was what I was pursing with the phylogeny/homology thread that got chopped up so bad: how do you determine a form is transitional, especially if morphology produces errors?

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This just gets us back to my favorite argument: species are imaginary.

[NotReady]

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This just gets us back to my favorite argument: species are imaginary.


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Which seems to mean:

Evolution is imaginary.

[vhawk01]

Definitely not. There are groups of species that are isolated from each other. This is just arbitrary and a lucky outcome of the fact that most organisms die. Once they become isolated, they diverge, and we call this speciation. Some people put too much emphasis on this, as if it were some magical thing, but its really not. Speciation is just the NORMAL way that two groups become isolated and thus divergent. There are other ways, such as temporality. We are seperate and thus divergent from my dead great-grandparents in their graves. They aren't changing, we are, and eventually we may be a different species than they are.

To be strictly correct, there wouldn't ever need to be any speciation for there to be evolution, but I know you mean speciation when you say evolution, so its a bit nitty. There could just be one big species of bacteria and there could still be evolution.

[vhawk01]

I thought of a better way to sum up my species complaint: 'Species' is really just another term for the point of no return along the divergence spectrum. All organisms are varying degrees of divergent from any of their neighbors, but this can ebb and flow, up until you get to the point of what we call speciation. This is simply because now they can no longer mix. If you put two groups of birds on opposite sides of some hypothetical eternal, impenetrable boundary, then the question of whether they can mate or not is entirely immaterial, and they are now two entirely different 'species,' regardless of the fact that they are pretty much identical, phenotypically.

[NotReady]

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There could just be one big species of bacteria and there could still be evolution.


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I usually mean macroevolution or OCA. I have no problem with microevolution or minimal speciation. The problem I see for OCA is you need transitional forms even if all of life is one species - you still gotta hop, skip and jump from microbe to man - how do you do that with no way to establish transition?

[NotReady]

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how do you do that with no way to establish transition?


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Let me throw something else out. This is very much a work in progress for me and I only bring it up to see if anyone wants to comment.

I've been going through a lot of the stuff on reasons.org. Whether you agree with them or not, they are way, way more qualified (many Ph.Ds in science) than most of the fundy sites on the web.

Briefly, they point out that as long as OCA is the only model to interpret the data it will never be abandoned because a bad model is better than no model. For years they have been constructing what they call a Creation Model. I have no desire at this time to debate the details of this. My point is that if evolutionists have no scientific basis to establish transitions that reduces OCA to a theory only, a model of explanation. I think Ross and Co. have it in mind to show that a Creation Model is as valid scientifically as OCA.

This would not establish Christianity as the Creator, but only that science can recognize that a creation model is as valid as OCA model. I think they have a point if transitions can't be normalized.

I've said before I can accept even OCA as a Christian, but I obviously would prefer some special creation. So I'm truly interested in what the data actually show, which model really fits best. And I think the focus has to be on transitions.

Edit: Ross believes in old earth and old universe - 4.5by and 14by, so he accepts Big Bang, etc.